Walter Hawthorne
Professor and chairperson of MSU’s Department of History
Expert in African history, history of slavery and slave trade
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Walter Hawthorne is a Professor of African History and Chair of the History Department. His areas research specialization are Upper Guinea, the Atlantic, and Brazil. He is particularly interested in the history of slavery and the slave trade. Much of his research has focused on African agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and family structures in the Old and New Worlds. Hawthorne's first book, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Heinemann:
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2003), explores the impact of interactions with the Atlantic, and particularly slave trading, on small-scale, decentralized societies. His most recent book, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade 1600-1830 (Cambridge: 2010), examines the slave trade from Upper Guinea to Amazonia Brazil. Hawthorne has published in a range of scholarly journals such as Journal of African History, Luso-Brazilian Review, Slavery and Abolition, Africa, Journal of Global History, and American Historical Review.
He is heavily involved in digital scholarship and has partnered with MATRIX, MSU’s digital humanities center, for a number of projects. They recently completed work on a British-Library funded archival digitization project in The Gambia. Documents from the project are available online. They have an ongoing NEH-sponsored project titled Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network, which is an online database with information about the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. Another NEH-sponsored project that to which Hawthorne is a central Islam and Modernity.
Education
Stanford University: Ph.D., History | 1998
University of Maryland: M.A., History | 1992
Hampden-Sydney College: B.A., History and Economics | 1988
Selected Press
Who were America’s enslaved? A new database humanizes the names behind the numbers
Smithsonian | 2020-12-11
Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Enslaved.org—described by its creators as a “linked open data platform” featuring information on people, events and places involved in the transatlantic slave trade—marks the culmination of almost ten years of work by Williams and fellow principal investigators Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University, and Dean Rehberger, director of Michigan State’s Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. Originally, the team conceived Enslaved.org as a space to simply house these different datasets, from baptismal records to runaway ads, ship manifests, bills of sale and emancipation documents. But, as Rehberger explains, “It became a project about how we can get datasets to interact with one another so that you can draw broader conclusions about slavery. … We’re going in there and grabbing all that data and trying to make sense of it, not just give [users] a whole long list of things.”
MSU uses $1.5m Mellon Foundation grant to build massive slave trade database
MSU Today | 2018-01-09
Michigan State University, supported by nearly $1.5 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will create a unique online data hub that will change the way scholars and the public understand African slavery.
Seven MSU graduate programs rank no. 1 nationally
MSU Today | 2017-03-14
Two more Michigan State University graduate programs – African history and supply chain – claimed top spots in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings, giving MSU seven No. 1 programs across a broad range of disciplines.
Faculty voice: Walter Hawthorne: African history at MSU
360 Perspective | 2017-03-14
Walter Hawthorne is a professor of African history and chairman of the Department of History. His areas of research specialization are Upper Guinea, the Atlantic and Brazil.
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